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Q&A: Pit People with Dan Paladin

Pit People‘s full release comes out March 2, and we provide a peak of the game’s creation with The Behemoth’s Dan Paladin!

After over a year in early access, the full game for Pit People is coming to gamers tomorrow! New cinematic scenes, bonus missions, and more are being added to the release. The game is developed by The Behemoth, is the genius behind games such as Castle Crashers and BattleBlock Theater.

The Behemoth co-founder and art director, Dan Paladin, graciously answers a few questions about creating the game!

1. How excited are you all for the final release on March 2?

We can hardly contain ourselves. It comes out tomorrow!!!

2. What inspired a story about a berry farmer with humble beginnings?

We originally had the cast as people who were recruited themselves and thrown into pit fights. They all met in the arena in the first iteration. They spoke of their roots to one another, but after experimenting with showing those roots it hit everyone a lot harder. Horatio originally had a steel shield and was later given a part of his farm fence to help drive the theme home. Stamper riffed off of that and recorded “blueberry farmer”, so I visually updated the farm and Hailey (P2 character) to reflect that.

On that same iteration, Pipistrella started with a regular mallet which was later swapped with one much more meaningful. The thematic reasoning for why she hates helmets helped keep a strong reminder to strategic gameplay as well. Those sorts of touches brought the characters to a more interesting version, we felt.

3. What was the most challenging and most fun part about developing Pit People?

Considering we’ve never done anything like this, and that the fundamental gameplay wasn’t really in existence anywhere else, nearly everything served to be a bit odd and challenging. It was more of a question of philosophy every single step of the way! We’d liken it to baking a cake by using non-standard ingredients and having absolutely no recipe — but still needing to get in the realm of tasting like a cake.

As for the most fun part…

Seeing people react to our Early Access version, updating it accordingly, and seeing if we nailed it. The interaction was fun, and seeing streamer reactions or reading player accounts of new content was exciting to look for.

4. Final words for the fans?! 🙂

Thank you for all of your feedback and support, thank you for your ongoing participation, playing, criticism, and love. Thank you for trusting us with our fourth explored genre! All of it helped shape and guide the project.

We are working on another update at this time, but when that comes out and what will be inside it is for later, after analyzing release feedback. See you in the Pit!!!! Get those 2v2 skills honed!!!!

PS. If you want to take advantage of the new camera controls for keyboard, please reset any existing save control settings to default on Steam. It will add in a WASD camera you can use. ❤